Is Community Leadership REAL Leadership?

[maggie chicoine]

Leadership Horizons: Photo Credit Richard Chicoine iCopyright 2009
"Soft focus is an important skill that can affect us metaphorically.
In other words, the way we see the future has everything to do with how well we can look up and see the expanded horizon before us." - Peter Kline


How Real is Community Leadership?
Is Corporate / Business Leadership more respected or of higher importance than charitable / not for profit leadership? Should corporate leadership be more community minded?

I applaud Leadership Victoria for distributing their study on the many facets of leadership. Apparently, many hours were spent around their board room table in ROBUST discussions, prior to writing the final document. Perhaps this kind of dialogue would be important for your organization to view your horizon from an alternative perspective.

With permission, here are excerpts from Leadership Victoria’s Report:


The Case for Community Leadership


“Some years back, a book of stories appeared with the catchy title:

“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”.

The title is effective — and affecting — because, though "love" is a charged word we all use, and though people will claim to know love when they see or feel it, most struggle to define it. The title is memorable because, with quirky good humour, it touches on a contradictory human truth.

As with love, so with community leadership, and not only because capable community leaders are often passionate and sometimes quirky. Like love, community leadership is much talked about — cited as a solution for daunting community challenges, invoked as the cure for the loss of community cohesion and identity, sought by community boards to rescue organizations adrift.

In Canada’s community leadership network, volunteers in twenty-two communities have devoted their time, attention, and labour, probably their money, and no doubt their hearts to building and running community leadership development organizations.

And yet, what we talk about when we talk about community leadership remains elusive. Opinions diverge even among those in
community leadership organizations, though a shared anxiety infuses the differing views.

At one extreme are those who suspect, echoing Gertrude Stein, that "leadership is leadership is leadership."
The dark secret of the movement, they say, is that its matter is no different from that taught in other programs. A perceived leadership deficit crossing social, political, and economic sectors has spawned a global cottage industry of sorts, with consultants, business schools, specialized institutes, and personal development experts widely offering leadership training. According to this view, what community leadership programs provide simply mirrors the training provided in good leadership programs everywhere.

Those with the opposite view suspect that though community leadership possesses a distinct character, it is a mere junior version of "real" leadership — that being leadership in business.

For many people, leadership currently is exemplified by leaders like Jack Welch, Carly Fiorina, Richard Branson, or Steve Jobs — the figuratively broad-shouldered, square-jawed, decisive heroes of the business press.

Ubiquitously profiled in popular management literature, business leadership has become for many the paragon of leadership everywhere, overshadowing even political, religious, and military leadership as an aspirational ideal.

And according to this view, all that community leadership can ever hope to do, really, is aspire.

What are we talking about when we talk about community leadership?

A more pointed question to have asked is, how do different organizational and social circumstances make different demands on and elicit different practices from leaders?

As noted, it is the character of the led that drives the character of leadership in particular contexts. People act and are motivated differently in the community at large and in community organizations than they do and are in businesses. It is not necessarily the case that the people are different people. More often than not they are the same people in a different situation, both the leaders and others.

It is telling in this regard that, very often, community leaders are also business leaders.

We often hear it stated that community organizations ought to become more businesslike, usually meaning that they need to be managed in a more orderly and structured fashion and led with a kind of abrupt decisiveness that some people seem to imagine is typical of business.

It’s true enough that many community organizations could be managed better. Particularly as community organizations grow and become more complex and highly structured, the genius of business leadership in maintaining large-scale, distributed task focus becomes more relevant, to take just one example.

But by the same token we could say that business ought to become more community-like. It is easy to think of situations in which the experience of effective community leaders is directly relevant to challenges faced by business — in the leadership of change, for example, in which the risk of job loss or transformation injects huge emotion into employees’ relationships with the organization; or in the leadership of the millennial generation, who, as HR departments are learning, are demanding a healthy dose of meaning in their jobs; or in the leadership of innovation teams or groups of knowledge workers, which are often structured almost as flat coalitions of professional equals; or in brand development based on community values; or in the leadership of community relations, in which businesses aim to engage the public and its concerns.

In many ways, the lessons of community leadership are as relevant to business as those of business leadership are to communities.

It is not case then that "leadership is leadership is leadership,"
but rather that "leaders are leaders are leaders" and that those with the inclination, training, experience, and skills to exercise leadership will probably do so capably, wherever they find themselves — in communities, in business, in government, or in the military, rising to the demands as occasion and context dictate.

We should expect therefore that the experience they garner in one sector not only adds to their depth as leaders, but is transferable to any other context in which they have the opportunity to exert their skills.

How individual leaders typically draw on the fundamental behavioural skillset to exercise leadership in various situations is what we call their "leadership style."

Community leadership starts with the creation of a passionate consensus for action. Through social entrepreneurship it builds the necessary organizational vehicles and programs. In articulating a vision of public good, it generates the broad support for issues that makes progress possible. In collaborative endeavour, it moves the agenda forward. And no doubt in engaging the public with a vision of innovative, collaborative purpose, it sets the stage for yet another small group of people to sit up, take notice, and decide to act together on a matter of shared concern that they feel is important.

That’s what we talk about when we talk about community leadership.”

If you are a leader - in whatever capacity - please send me your comments about Community Leadership. I'd love to have a ROBUST discussion with as many of you as possible.
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Maggie Chicoine is the Lead Facilitator for Leadership Thunder Bay. She is a Keynote Speaker, Master Coach and Professional Writer specializing in strategies to think ahead. Reach Maggie at 1 800 587 1767 or www.theideasculptor.com. Her column, The Tuesday File appears in www.lakesuperiornews.com weekly.

Reprinted with permission. Prepared for Leadership Victoria by Mitchell Temkin Principal, Associatus Consulting